


Sink

by lucianlibrarian



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Anxiety, IgNoct, Ignoct Week, Ignoct Week 2019, M/M, Pining, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Swimming, Swimming Pools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 04:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20076007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucianlibrarian/pseuds/lucianlibrarian
Summary: Ignis likes to swim at the Citadel pool when he thinks no one's around. Little does he know there is someone around.





	Sink

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I have more written for IgNoct Week than this, but Days 2 and 4 ended up blending together. Plus, I got sick, and well, fell behind. Isn't that always the way of things?
> 
> This piece is done, though, or as done as it'll be before it gets cannibalized. I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but that's probably my own inner anxiety-voice yelling at me like Iggy's yells at him. 
> 
> [ _written for IgNoct Week 2019, day 3: habits/quirks_ ]

_Empty as usual_, Ignis thought with a smile.

No one knew how much pleasure the advisor took in monopolizing the Citadel pool after hours. He’d absolutely hated taking laps with the Crownsguard—or, Heavens forbid, the godsdamned Kingsglaive—back in the early days of his training. It seemed none of them understood basic swimming etiquette. The order of lanes according to approximate swim speeds. How to overtake. How to avoid blocking overtakers. That laps were not races unless specifically stated. The difference between taking a break to catch your breath and clogging entrances and exits with conversation.

And while he certainly understood that swimsuits had a tendency to shift, there was an art to addressing that issue. Subtle adjustments were one thing, but some of the downright disgusting _digs_ he’d witnessed underwater were another thing entirely. The memory of a particularly horrific one had prompted him to refuse handshakes from a certain glaive forever.

It was far too late, however, for anyone else to be swimming, and this was just how Ignis liked it. A deserted pool where etiquette be damned. He took the left-most lane, noting that most of the right-hand ropes were missing today—_Perhaps an exercise requiring extra space?_—and began taking his laps. His pace was controlled, almost leisurely. Hardly the speed of a left-lane swimmer, but who was here to correct him? He focused on his muscles, the soreness he’d come to soothe and stretch with each stroke.

His last few training sessions with Gladiolus and Noctis had been monstrous, he recalled through gritted teeth. Sparring had left him with extra bruises. Knots in muscles he barely realized he had. Most troublesome of all, a sense of _something else_ he couldn’t quite place. Not the usual anxiety he knew, that critical alien voice driving him towards perfection—_Lazy! Stupid!_ it hissed, as if to remind him that it was still there, still watching—but an altogether unknown feeling.

_Why do I feel so off? Why am I having so much trouble sleeping? What is it?_

_You’d know, _his anxiety said,_ if you weren’t so fucking stupid. You’re a fool. An idiot. An imposter. _It honed in on that word, one of its favorites. _Imposter. Imposter! Imposter-imposter-imposterimposter—_

_205 grams butter. Freeze butter in advance to help maintain shape while cubing—_

Ignis began to recall his recipes, including personal notes, to drown out the voice of his anxiety. Jumped to a second dish—_one wild onion, peeled, cut into 2 cm slices, and then diced—_to prevent interruptions to an easy recitation. Threw in a review of tomorrow’s schedule—_5:15 AM, alarm and coffee; 5:30 AM, shower and morning preparations; 6:00 AM, coffee and email review_—to complicate things further. The more complex, the better. If his thoughts were too smooth, too rehearsed, the voice would return more quickly. He’d had years of practice drowning it out.

Suddenly, he realized he was winded. _Of course._ He’d picked up his pace as the aches receded and anxieties taken over. Who knew how long he’d been pushing himself at top speed? Ignis stopped at the shallow end of the lane to catch his breath, relishing the heated water as he massaged his neck and shoulder to work out the excess tension he always carried there.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something at the bottom of the opposite corner of the pool. Ignis turned, took a breath, lowered his head beneath the surface to look.

_Is that...Noctis?_

It was. Noctis was sitting on the bottom of the pool, knees to his chest, arms curled around them. His head rested against one shoulder, hair ghosting around it like an impossible living nimbus. The prince was turned almost entirely away from him, his face unseeable, the scar on his back barely visible from across the pool—almost a trick of the light underwater, almost scale-like, almost—

_Oh sweet Shiva, is he drowning?_ Ignis snapped out of his staring, surfaced to take another breath and dunked down to swim to Noctis. He was about to push off the wall when the prince moved his head. Pushed lightly off the pool floor.

An arm dragged up, out. A leg extended backwards, impossibly long—_can’t be, Noctis isn’t that tall_—until it wasn’t and crooked thighward. Sharper movements provided leverage, momentum. Back flip. Pirouette. Dolphin kick downward to graze the floor again, brush the surface with outstretched fingertips. A brief searching crawl before another gentle push. Arms extended again. Fingers trailed across arms, compared textures of wet skin and concrete. In response to the difference, Noctis arched his head back. Enraptured.

_This is a dance!_ Ignis realized with a start. _I’m watching the prince dance underwater!_

Some part of his brain screamed to look away, that this was too intimate for him to see. His knuckles screamed, too, protesting his merciless grip on the pool’s edge. The loudest screams, however, came from his lungs. Those were the screams Ignis listened to. He breached the surface with a loud gasp.

Moments later, Noctis did, too.

The two young men faced one another, shaky breaths echoing through the pool area.

“Fuck,” Noctis said, his voice a low growl.

_What have I done what have I seen oh shit oh shit— _Ignis’s thoughts were a frantic mess. “H-Highness, I-I-I didn’t know and thought you were drowning—”

The prince flinched, held up his hands. “No! It’s okay, really!” All the danger in his voice was gone, replaced by an apologetic nervousness. “Hold on, okay? I’m coming over.” He took several slow, deep breaths, dove under, swam toward the advisor in one long, fluid glide, and popped up mere inches from his chamberlain’s face.

“So. What are you doing?” Noctis asked, his eyes downcast but voice far more even than it should have been.

Ignis was at once hyper-aware of three things: Noctis wasn’t wearing goggles and had been doing all of his underwater work with eyes closed, which demanded incredible body and special awareness; he’d just swam almost the entire diagonal length of the pool in a single breath and was barely winded; and Ignis himself was 99% certain he could script the conversation that was about to unfold between the two of them.

_Let’s see if I’m right. _“Swimming, of course,” he said with a smile and shrug. _Now he’ll roll his eyes and clarify time of night._

“Well, yeah.” Eye roll. “But I mean, why at this time of night?”

_Bullseye. _“Avoiding the masses so I can swim in peace. Same as you, I suppose?” _He’ll agree, fall silent, look away. He doesn’t want to acknowledge what I saw._

“Heh, you know me.” There was a long pause, and Noctis turned to stare out at the far side of the pool where he’d been mere minutes before.

_Goodness, I might know Noctis better than I know myself._ But Ignis could practically see walls being erected between them—_Imposter! Unworthy! Get out of his sight!_—so he filled the silence with an apology. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. If you’d like, I can leave. I was just wrapping up—”

“I know. But you’re wondering.” Noctis hoisted himself onto one of the lane ropes and sat. Blue eyes shimmered in the heat, unreadable. “How I do it. The breath work. The sinking. The—” Here, he gestured vaguely with his hand at the opposite end of the pool, droplets flying off his fingertips. “The rest.”

“I—” _Didn’t predict that. Have I miscalculated?_ “Yes, actually, I am.”

“I learned it when I was doing endurance training during my recovery. You have to have good breath control to do it for more than a few seconds, but other than that, it’s all about how you enter the water and let your air out. Basic physics stuff.” The prince slid off the ropes and paddled toward the middle of the pool. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Ignis watched as Noctis took a couple of deep breaths and slid straight down into the water. When the advisor looked under the surface, he could see the prince had tucked himself into a ball. Noctis alternated blowing bubbles through his mouth and nose, slowly sinking until he reached the pool floor. There, he took a cross-legged seat, gave Ignis a thumbs-up, and pushed up to the surface. As he lazily paddled back over, he said, “That’s about it, really. You could probably do it, too, with a little practice.”

_Maybe the sitting part, but—_ “How long can you stay down there?”

Noctis frowned. “If I don’t move at all…a few minutes? Never actually timed it. Not about that, though. I just like doing it. Being down there, it’s different. Like…” He trailed off, chewed his lips as he searched for words. “It’s like not having any magic anymore, but also like being made entirely of magic all at once. It’s really hard to explain. But it feels wonderful. Some nights, I’ll come here just to sit on the bottom over and over again until I can’t.”

Ignis found himself staring at Noctis’s teeth-swollen mouth. The color reminded him of ripe berries. “But you weren’t just sitting.”

“Mmm. Do you remember Countess Astaci’s daughter?”

_Huh? _“I-I think so. Didn’t she do aquatic therapy with you a long time ago?”

“Yeah. She was so funny. All she ever wanted to do was handstands, y’know? She’d make me do them with her. Then one day, when I flipped over after falling out of one, I got this flutter in my stomach. I dunno, it just felt really nice. Reminded me of something with the magic, a good thing. So, I kinda floated there, enjoying it.” The prince shook his head, chuckled. “Then she came over and tickled me.”

Ignis smiled softly at Noctis. He’d always been so kind to the girl, a tiny thing who’d lost her legs in a car accident. _Didn’t the Astacis transfer to Accordo about two months after she’d started sessions with him? _The smile slid off his face, the connection made years after the fact. _He was so depressed and withdrawn for weeks. Six, I never realized._

The anxiety reared up. _Failure! Imposter!_

Ignis pressed his lips into a tight line, as if the pressure could force those voices silent. “So the flips and extensions are to recreate that sensation?” He struggled to keep his voice free of emotion.

“Basically. I mean, I just do whatever I feel like. Most of it comes from yoga and aquatherapy and all those PT exercises. But when I get those flutters, it makes being down there even more special.” Noctis flicked his eyes up, and the advisor could swear there was a question floating behind them, a question the prince expected him to answer.

_What is he asking?_

_Do I even know the answer?_

_Is he…blushing?_

Finally, Noctis sighed and turned away, stalking toward the steps. “I’m keeping you. You’re never here this late on a weeknight.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t stay past 11,” he said, climbing out, “unless you come on a weekend. I assume because you can sleep in, right?”

“Well, yes, of course. But how do you—“

“Specs, really,” he said, smirking over his shoulder as he grabbed a towel from one of the nearby racks. “You’ve only been coming after hours for a few months. I’ve been doing it a lot longer. Gimme _some_ credit.”

Ignis felt his jaw drop. “I’ve never noticed you.”

The prince’s head whipped around so hard, Ignis was surprised the momentum didn’t topple him over. “You didn’t?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Noctis’s shoulders slumped as his voice dropped to a near whisper, almost as insubstantial as the steam from the pool. “Well,” he mumbled, absently rubbing the towel through his hair and wrapping it around his waist, “it’s no big deal. You’re so always so focused, and it’s different for me anyway. I can hear you swimming—”

_You weren’t looking_. This wasn’t Ignis’s usual interior voice, nor the voice of his anxiety. This one was different, gentler. _You never had a reason to look. You do now._

_What’s the reason, besides just making him feel better? _he asked himself. _Could that be enough? Or is there more?_

“I’ll be sure to look for you, Noct.”

“Thanks.” His smile was luminous. “Anyway, it’s late, and we both need to get some sleep. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“You shall indeed.”

“G’night, Specs. Get home safely.”

As Ignis watched his prince retreat into the locker rooms, the quiet slap of his feet fading to silence, he wondered if Noctis understood the nuance of Ignis’s answer. The simple futurity of _shall_. There was no wish involved; it just would be, no questions asked.

_Have you ever wondered why?_ That gentle voice again. _Perhaps those walls you think you see have been yours all along._

After several minutes of staring into the heated mist, as if expecting the prince to reemerge, Ignis finally stripped off his goggles and stepped out the pool. _I’m getting up in less than six hours at this rate. _But there it was again, that feeling of something else on the edge of his emotions. This time, however, he got the sense that he would get at least a little sleep, but it would be haunted by silence. Airless water. His prince, royal black and death white, dancing. Just out of reach. Just out of breath.

**Author's Note:**

> Bother me on Discord—starryfox#7213—if you wanna listen to me babble about random shit. ♥


End file.
